The wait was excruciating, the Ilyushin had been loaded up and was waiting on the strip. Three times a day, sometimes four, we returned to our pad, the Hotel Condor del Plata, named after a famous Patagonian biplane. The hotel was decorated with photos of the pilots in jodhpurs, riding boots and leather flying jackets. Ominously for us, there were also pictures of the heroic last flight into a Patagonian fjord, the wingtips poking out of the water. The Hotel is owned by Nicholas Alvares, a happy and jovial lawyer whose English wife considers the Patagonian climate gentler than that at home. There really is no pleasing some people. On our first night here my old friend David Hamilton returned from a successful trip to Vinson, having suffered a twelve day delay in getting in and five day storm while there. He was almost a month late returning home. By comparison our trip was exceedingly smooth.

After all the waiting, things had suddenly began to happen without time to think. We were given half-an-hour´s notice to dress in Polar clothing before being shuttled off to the airport and onto our waiting transport.

The inside of the beautifully sculpted Ilyushin was just a cargo hold, with a large kitchen clock at one end set, confusingly, to Dubai time. The flight engineer was also the attendant, or at least I guess he was because when the engines started up, and we could no longer hear, he began to wave his arms about and point to the one exit door, then held up something a bit like an oxygen mask and life vest. Either he was doing the emergency exit thing or a Fat Boy Slim impression. With the noise it was not obvious which. Talking to the man I discovered he was from Archangel and the pilot from Moscow (as was the plane I suppose). But the clock did not refer to the Russian time zones. Nor did it refer to Zulu (Greenwhich) Time. Punta and Patriot both operated on Chile time. In fact, no amount of interrogation ever revealed why the aircraft flew on the time zone of a small middle eastern kingdom.

The flight to Patriot Hills was just over four hours, at three and a half hours we were flying past latitude 78 degrees, and could see the Vinson Massif on our right horizon. At Patriot, the runway really was just blue ice, as if a large lake had frozen over. I could hardly imagine the bravery of the first pilot to risk landing a jet here.

When we eventually slowed to a halt, the rear loading doors opened to let in a blinding flood of white light. When our eyes had adjusted, we gingerly stepped out onto the sheet ice. The first person I met shook me by the hand and hugged me, which was a bit of a shock at first first, and even more of a shock on realization it was my old house mate, Steve Jones. We had not seen each other for fifteen years. ALE (see previous blog) fed us in a polar hut, we set up our tents for the a few hours and waited for the weather at Vinson basecamp to become right for the Twin Otters.

ALE not only organizes the flight to Vinson and the Pole, but also seeks to minimize our impact on the environment. All solid waste, including feces is removed from Antarctica and flown back to South America. At Vinson base camp and at Patriot Hills ALE provide toilet facilities for this, while on the mountain we all carried so called ¨wag bags¨ which flew home with us (gently thawing) on the return flight.

The next day (remembering that in the polar summer there is no night) the Twin Otters flew the expedition teams out to Vinson base camp. There was a Russian team, a German team, and American, a small team with ALE, a pair of Belgians and us. About 28 people in all. By Christmas Eve all the teams had established and occupied Camp One. In previous years the strategy on Vinson had been to use three camps above base. Now the pattern seems to be two. Boxing day was spent ferrying food and fuel to the high camp between Mount Shin and Vinson. This gave us the opportunity to acclimatize, and also served as a useful reminder that when the wind blows the arctic can be truly vicious. All the goggles froze over, and fingers inside down mitts chilled dangerously.

The next day we woke at midday (recall once more, there was no night) cached our sleds tying them down against the wind, filled the rucksacks then strapped on tents, marker wands, shovels and snow saws, and very slowly made our way up the head wall below the high camp. On arrival we dug out tent platforms and built snow walls to the shed the wind.

The next day was used as a rest day by half the expedition teams but we chose to seize the period of good weather for a two-hour excursion. After the two hours had elapsed it became clear the weather was not as bad on the mountain as it appeared to be in the high camp. We pushed on. The total distance from the camp to the summit is around eleven and a half kilometers, the height gain some twelve hundred metres. It was to take us seven hours to reach the top, in patches of good vizibility with an icy wind blowing from the east. We had not had a rest day, the team was tired. The two medics, Doug and Dave repeated a strange little mantra ¨Pain is just weakness leaving the body¨ while Wim, our project managing Belgian countered with ¨The only problem is that the weakness just grows right back¨. Samantha maintained a wise silence.

The summit ridge of Vinson is what turns it from a walk (in wild surroundings) into a climb. This is what makes the outing enjoyable; passing little snow pyramids and rock outcrops of a peculiar texture. The rocks have the same rippled pattern waves leave on sandy beaches. We reached the summit at 18:00hrs on 28 December 2005.

It took just three hours to stagger down to the high camp, and five hours the next day to return to Vinson base, pulling our sleds and looking forward to the Salmon burgers we had cached there.

By 08:00hrs on 30 December we were back in Punta Arenas in time to catch our rest day before the fireworks and celebrations as the new year rolled across the lines of longitude.